NU AUSTERITY, isn't just a trend, it's a philosophy, as a growing number of consumers in Europe, the UK and US are demonstrating.

By NU AUSTERITY we mean a return to basic values, materials and a way of life that is all about sustainability and conspicuous abstention.

Once if you had it - you flaunted it - now if you have it - you hang on to it - trade it on eBay - or recycle it.

We are beginning to make do and mend as our 1950s forebears. And just like them we are beginning to ask pointed questions about the nature of ‘family' and ‘community' once more.

We are no longer sitting on the fence, but coming clean about our views. We are peeling things back, stripping things down, demanding that everything from luxury, to retail, to homes and interiors, take on a more essential and sustainable edge.

Get ready to meet the New Puritans, Conscience Consumers, Freegans and the Rights and Responsibilities Generation who want everything from smoking, to fatty foods, to excessive drinking outlawed.

I am not a one-sided person. I am neither for the inner nor for the outer, I am for

both together.One has to be rich inside and one has to be rich outside too.

Richness is beautiful; outer richness is beautiful just as inner richness is beautiful.

Nothing is wrong in creating money.

But when one becomes rich outside, then the idea arises, “Why can I not become rich in the inside too? Why not? If society can come to such a rich, beautiful status, why can consciousness not come to the same?” Hence the great exploration.The new generation is throbbing, and the momentum Will grow more and more. By the end of this century a great door is going to open. It is not absolutely certain that man may not miss it – man may miss it. It is just an opportunity, a possibility, but it has never been greater than it is today.

The coming twenty years are going to be of constantly accelerating momentum

Business is about problem-solving, but it does not always have to be about maximizing profit. When I went into business, my interest was to figure out how to solve problems I see in front of me. That's why I looked at the poverty issue. I got involved in lots of things to address it, and one of them was money lending with loans and credits and savings accounts, and in the process I created Grameen Bank.

As Michael Strong has so rightly brought to our attention - in Liberating the Entrpreneurial Spirit for Good - Milton Friedman, mistakenly considered to be “conservative” by many - has long explicitly claimed that he was not a conservative, and in fact has always favored most of all an innovative society – making these points well in his Capitalism and Freedom :-

“The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. Columbus did not set out to seek a new route to China in response to a majority directive of parliament, though he was partly financed by an absolute monarch.

Newton and Leibnitz; Einstein and Bohr; Shakespeare, Milton, and Pasternak; Whitney, McCormick, Edison, and Ford; Jane Addams, Florence Nightengale, and Albert Schweitzer; no one of these opened up new frontiers in human knowledge and understanding, in literature, in technical possibilities, or in the relief of human misery in response to governmental directives.

Their achievements were the product of individual genius, of strongly held minority views, of a social climate permitting variety and diversity. Government can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action. At any moment in time, by imposing uniform standards in housing, or nutrition, or clothing, government could undoubtedly improve the level of living of many individuals; by imposing uniform standards in schooling, road construction, or sanitation, central government could undoubtedly improve the level of performance in many local areas and perhaps even on the average of all communities.

But in the process government would replace progress by stagnation, it would substitute uniform mediocrity for the variety essential for that experimentation which can bring tomorrow’s laggards above today’s mean.”

Michael Strong then goes on to say …

It has been a terrible mistake for our society to have politicized this issue. For much of the 20th century, belief in voluntary action was considered “conservative” and belief in government action was considered “progressive.”

While there were most certainly abuses in the realm of voluntary behavior in the 19th century, the reaction against voluntarism, throughout most of the 20th century, was extraordinarily overblown. Few understood the extent to which innovation relies on the individual initiative of thousands of unkn..., nor the extent to which government would largely clunk along in the service of established elites (including established corporations, established unions, established academic institutions, established medical organizations, etc.) Laws will always tend to favor the established and visible over the not yet visible, unproven “gleam in the eye” of the unknown amateur.

Welcome to the Dawn of Conscious Capitalism - a popular, decentralized, broad-based crusade to heal the excesses of capitalism with transcendent human values.

Every day Conscious Capitalism wins new converts in the paneled boardrooms of global business…. Equally important, the actions millions of us take, “from the supermarket to the stock market,” are drafting a more wholistic brand of free enterprise which will forever outshine the Chicago School–and win someone somewhere a brand-new Nobel Prize.

As used in economics the term “capital” would be defined as follows: Capital refers to resources withheld from immediate consumption in the expectation of greater future returns. However controversial a topic this has been, capital has been the main–if not the only–way of achieving progress, even in voilently anticapitalist, socialist countries. A dam, a hospital, a university, a cathedral, or a national park cannot be built without using up resources that would be easier to consume immediately, and none of them would be built at all unless they were believed to provide some greater returns in the future.

Following what could turn out to be the PEAK OIL price of $147 per barrel & the subsequent global economic collapse, Richard Heinberg, who featured inthe trailer to The Great Squeeze video posted with this zblog@gaia, recently asked the question …

Let us develop a deeply shared morality, which shall be the fabric of our truly successful society. Polarization leaves us only the cold, barren landscape of civil strife. Let’s listen to one another, talk with one another, recognize some things that need doing, and do them."

‎"EVOLUTIONARY is a play on the word "REVOLUTIONARY", and I mean it to convey something of the revolutionary nature of evolution as an idea. Evolutionaries are revolutionaries, with all the personal and philosophical commitment that word implies.

They are not merely curious bystanders to the evolutionary process, passive believers in the established sciences of evolution, though all certainly value those insights.

They are committed activists and advocates - often passionate ones - for the importance of evolution at a cultural level."